On August 30, the Israeli Cabinet approved a draft agreement on
"Palestinian self-rule" that had been reached by the government of
Israel and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat's personal representatives.
Parts of the agreement have not been revealed or are not yet settled
at the time of writing (September 2), but it is likely that something
much like the published text (NYT, Sept. 1) will be
instituted, and that it will be followed by separate agreements
between Israel and Arab states.

To understand what has been achieved, it is necessary to recall
the relevant background, much of it familiar to readers of this
journal, at least.

The June 1967 war brought the superpowers perilously close to
confrontation, driving home the importance of a diplomatic
settlement. In November 1967, the UN Security Council passed
Resolution 242, which expressed a broad international consensus on
the general terms for a settlement. The current agreement is based
entirely on UN 242 (and 338, which endorses it). Article I of the
1993 draft agreement, outlining the "Aim of the Negotiations,"
specifies that "the negotiations on the permanent status will lead to
the implementation of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338"; no
other UN Resolutions are mentioned, thus resolving a central issue in
the controversy in accord with US-Israeli demands.

UN 242 "emphasiz[es] the inadmissibility of acquisition of
territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in
which every state in the area can live in security." It calls for
"Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the
recent conflict" and "Termination of all claims or states of
belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty,
territorial integrity and political independence of every state in
the area and their right to live in peace within secure and
recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force." It calls
for an agreement among states; Palestinian rights are
mentioned only in the call for "a just settlement of the refugee
problem," left unspecified. UN 242 is therefore thoroughly
rejectionist, if we understand the concept of rejectionism in
nonracist terms: as denial of the right to national
self-determination of one or the other of the two contending
parties in the former Palestine.

With varying degrees of ambiguity, UN 242 was accepted by the
contending states of the region over the next few years, though their
interpretations differed. The Arab states rejected full peace, Israel
rejected full withdrawal.

The phrase "withdrawal from territories" has been a particular
bone of contention. In most of the world (including Europe), it has
been understood to imply Israeli withdrawal from all of the
territories occupied during the war, with at most minor -- and mutual
-- adjustments. At first, that was also Washington's interpretation.
UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg informed King Hussein of Jordan that
the US insisted that "there must be a mutuality in adjustments," a
classified State Department history observes: to both Israel and the
Arab states, "U.S. officials emphasized that any territorial
adjustments would be limited in nature and would not, of necessity,
be detrimental to the Arab states"; there would be at most "minor
reciprocal border rectifications" with no "substantial withdrawing of
the [pre-war] map." It was on this understanding, explicitly
conveyed by US government mediators, that the Arab states accepted
the resolution, and the US itself unequivocally held to this
interpretation until 1971. In those years, Israel was alone among
major actors in rejecting this interpretation of the document.

The disagreements over interpretation came to a head in February
1971, when UN mediator Gunnar Jarring presented a proposal to Egypt
and Israel that called for full peace between them in return for full
Israeli withdrawal from Egyptian territory. Egyptian President Sadat
accepted the proposal. Sadat's acceptance of Jarring's "famous" peace
proposal was a "bombshell," Prime Minister Rabin recalls in his
memoirs, a "milestone." While officially welcoming Egypt's expression
"of its readiness to enter into a peace agreement with Israel," the
government of Israel rejected the agreement, stating that "Israel
will not withdraw to the pre-June 5, 1967 lines. The reasoning was
explained by Haim Bar-Lev of the governing Labor Party: "I think that
we could obtain a peace settlement on the basis of the earlier
[pre-June 1967] borders. If I were persuaded that this is the
maximum that we might obtain, I would say: agreed. But I think that
it is not the maximum. I think that if we continue to hold out, we
will obtain more."

The crucial question was how Washington would react. The
Jarring-Sadat agreement was consistent with official US policy. There
was, however, a conflict between the State Department and National
Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, who was then engaged in a campaign
to undermine and displace Secretary of State Rogers, as he was soon
to do. Kissinger insisted that the US must insist upon "stalemate":
no diplomacy, no negotiations. His position prevailed, and Sadat's
peace offer was rejected.

Since 1971, the US and Israel have been virtually alone in
rejecting the standard interpretation of the withdrawal clause of UN
242. The basic cause for the misery and suffering that followed is
their conviction, which has proven to be correct, that "if we
continue to hold out, we will obtain more." The isolation of the US
and Israel became still more marked by the mid-1970s, when the terms
of the international consensus shifted to include a Palestinian state
in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, thus departing from earlier
rejectionism. In January 1976, the US vetoed a Security Council
resolution calling for a settlement in terms of UN 242, with this
amendment. The US veto, repeated later, excluded the Security Council
from the diplomacy. The General Assembly continued to pass
near-unanimous resolutions in similar terms (the US and Israel
opposed); a negative US vote amounts to a veto. The US also blocked
initiatives from Europe, the Arab states, the PLO and others. The
last of the regular UN resolutions was in the midst of the Gulf
conflict, in December 1990 (144-2).

Through this period, the US and Israel were the leaders of the
rejectionist camp, joined by increasingly marginal elements of the
Islamic world, justly termed "extremist." The conclusions being
unacceptable, the facts have been "vetoed" along with numerous peace
initiatives, buried deep in the memory hole together with Sadat's
"famous milestone" and much else that is inconvenient.

Israel's policy spectrum with regard to the occupied territories
is illuminated in a study by Peace Now, which compares four different
plans for the territories from 1968 to 1992, asking how many
Palestinians would be within areas annexed by Israel if these plans
were enacted today: (I) the 1968 Allon Plan (Labor); (II) the 1976
Labor Party Settlement Plan (never officially adopted though "it has
informed practical decision-making and action"); (III) the Ariel
Sharon Plan of 1992 (Likud), which created eleven isolated and
discontinuous "cantons" for Palestinian autonomy; (IV) the Defense
Establishment Plan of 1992 (Labor), which deals only with the West
Bank. The number of Palestinians in settlements to be annexed are as
follows:

Allon Plan: 385,000, 91,000 in the West Bank and the rest in
Gaza

Labor Party Settlement Plan: 603,000, 310,000 in the West
Bank

Sharon Plan: 393,000, 378,000 in the West Bank

Defense Establishment Plan: 204,000 in the West Bank, Gaza
unspecified

To these figures must be added the 150,000 Palestinians of East
Jerusalem, to be annexed in all plans, the Peace Now study notes.
"The Labor Party plan of 1976 would annex the greatest number of
Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza," while the Sharon Plan "is
the maximalist plan with regard to the West Bank," though ceding
self-rule to more Gaza Palestinians than the Labor plans.

As the analysis indicates, the policy spectrum has been narrow,
and invariably rejectionist. The political blocs have differed on
West Bank Arab population concentrations, Labor being more concerned
than Likud to exclude them from areas scheduled for Israeli takeover.
Washington has favored Labor Party rejectionism, more rational than
the Likud variety, which has no real provision for the population of
the occupied territories except eventual "transfer" (expulsion).

After the Gulf war, Europe accepted the US position that the
Monroe Doctrine effectively extends over the Middle East; Europeans
would henceforth refrain from independent initiatives, limiting
themselves to helping implement US rejectionist doctrine, as Norway
indeed did in 1993. The Soviet Union was gone from the scene, its
remnants now loyal clients of Washington. The UN had become virtually
a US agency. Whatever space the superpower conflict had left for
nonalignment was gone, and the catastrophe of capitalism that swept
the traditional colonial domains of the West in the 1980s left the
Third World mired in general despair, disciplined by forces of the
managed market. With Arab nationalism dealt yet another crushing blow
by Saddam's aggression and terror and PLO tactics of more than the
usual ineptitude, the Arab rulers had less need than before to
respond to popular pressures with pro-Palestinian gestures. The US
was therefore in a good position to advance its rejectionist program
without interference, moving towards the solution outlined by
Secretary of State James Baker well before the Gulf crisis: any
settlement must be based on the 1989 plan of the government of
Israel, which flatly bars Palestinian national rights (Baker Plan,
December 1989).

Washington's general goals have been stable for a long period. The
basic concern is the enormous oil wealth of the region. Planning has
long been guided by a strategic conception that assigns local
management to an "Arab Facade" of weak and dependent dictators, who
will ensure that profits from Gulf oil flow primarily to the US (and
its British client), not to the people of the region. A network of
regional gendarmes is to keep order; local "cops on the beat" as
Nixon's Defense Secretary, Melvin Laird, described them in the
context of the Nixon Doctrine. The responsibility of the Middle East
cops was outlined in 1973 by the Senate's leading expert on the
topic, Henry Jackson: to "inhibit and contain those irresponsible and
radical elements in certain Arab States...who, were they free to do
so, would pose a grave threat indeed to our principal sources of
petroleum in the Persian Gulf" -- more accurately, to the vast wealth
they yield. Senator Jackson was referring specifically to the tacit
alliance between Israel, Iran (under the Shah), and Saudi Arabia.

As for Kurds, Palestinians, slum-dwellers in Cairo, and others who
contribute nothing to the basic structure of power -- they have no
rights, by the most elementary principles of statecraft. Perhaps they
can occasionally be used in one or another power play, but that is
where their rights end, as the history of the Kurds has demonstrated,
today once again. The status of the Palestinians has been even lower
than that of other worthless people; their value is not zero, but
negative, in that their plight has had a disruptive effect in the
Arab world, thus interfering with US goals. They must therefore be
marginalized somehow, perhaps under a form of "autonomy" that leaves
them to manage their own affairs under Israeli supervision. That
plan, proposed at Camp David, was taken up when the "peace process"
was renewed at Madrid in the Fall of 1991. As the conference opened,
one of Israel's most knowledgeable and acute observers of the
territories, journalist Danny Rubinstein, wrote that the US and
Israel were proposing "autonomy as in a POW camp, where the prisoners
are `autonomous' to cook their meals without interference and to
organize cultural events." Palestinians are to be granted little more
control over local services, he wrote, adding that even advocates of
Greater Israel never call for literal annexation of the territories,
which would require Israel to provide the "restricted services"
available to Israel's second-class Arab citizens, at enormous
cost.

As discussed here at the time, the best outcome, from Washington's
point of view, would be a settlement that entrenches the traditional
strategic conception and gives it a public form, raising tacit
understandings to a formal treaty. If some arrangement for local
"autonomy" can suppress the Palestinian issue, well and good.
Meanwhile security arrangements among Israel, Turkey, Egypt and the
United States can be extended, perhaps bringing others in if they
accept the client role. There need be no further concern over
possible Soviet support for attempts within the region to interfere
with such designs.

While the negotiations were proceeding without issue, Israel
stepped up the harsh repression in the territories, following the
thinking outlined by Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin (now Prime
Minister). In February 1989, he explained to Peace Now leaders that
the US had granted Israel time to suppress the Intifada by force,
diverting attention by meaningless diplomatic maneuvers: "The
inhabitants of the territories are subject to harsh military and
economic pressure," Rabin said: "in the end, they will be broken" and
will accept Israel's terms. These policies achieved much success,
extended with Rabin's recent "closure" of the territories, a crushing
blow to the staggering Palestinian economy.

From the early days of the Intifada, if not before, it was
becoming clear that the PLO leadership was losing its popular support
in the occupied territories. Local activists from secular nationalist
sectors, while still recognizing the PLO as the sole agent for
negotiations, spoke with open contempt of its corruption, personal
power plays, opportunism, and disregard for the interests and
opinions of the people it claimed to represent.

By all indications, the disaffection increased in the years that
followed, while the fundamentalist opposition that Israel had
initially nurtured gained popular support, feeding on this growing
discontent and on the demoralization as Rabin's program was
implemented, with constant US support at all levels: economic,
diplomatic, and ideological.

These matters, reviewed with particular detail and depth in Israel
Shahak's regular reports, have received only sporadic and inadequate
coverage here.

With its popular support in decline and its status deteriorating
in the Arab world, the PLO became more tolerable to US-Israeli
policymakers, particularly as the growing fundamentalist movement
evoked memories of the resistance that had driven Israel out of much
of Lebanon. Informal Israel-PLO contacts were increasingly reported.
These reached their culmination with the August 1993 agreement, which
bypassed the delegations engaged in the official "peace process," and
indeed also excluded the PLO, apart from Arafat and a few close
associates.

The agreement was welcomed with great acclaim, marred only by
skepticism as to whether it could hold. "America's own greatest
interest," the twin goals of "enhanced security for Israel and
regional peace," both...seem closer to achievement this morning than
ever before," the New York Times editors observed as the
agreement was announced. Apart from omission of the tacit background
understanding that the "regional peace" must ensure US control, their
identification of Washington's highest priorities is accurate, though
automatic identification of US government policy with "America's
greatest interest" takes a leap of faith; it is not obvious that
ignoring Palestinian national rights and the security of others is in
the interest of the people of the United States.

The editors may, however, be right in thinking that long-standing
US policy goals have been advanced. The intended eventual outcome of
the 1993 agreement falls well within the bounds of traditional
US-Israeli rejectionism, adopting essential features of the Sharon
Plan as well as the Labor Party's Allon Plan. That much was spelled
out the same day on the facing page of the Times by
Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin, a close associate of
Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. He informed his US audience that

"the permanent solution will be based on Israeli
withdrawal from Gaza and from most of the West Bank. We agree to a
confederated formula between Jordan and the Palestinians in the
West Bank, but we will not return to pre-1967 borders. United
Jerusalem will remain the capital of the State of Israel."

In return, "After years of rejection of Israel as part of the
Middle East, the Arabs will accept and recognize Israel's right to
exist as a sovereign state within secure and defined borders in this
region" -- as they did, for example, in the vetoed Security Council
resolution of January 1976, gone from history along with much else
like it, so that Beilin's statement will ring true to American
ears.

The reasons for preferring "confederation" to Palestinian
independence have nothing to do with security. As has been understood
since 1948, when Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion made the point
explicit, an independent Palestinian state serves Israeli security
interests better than "a state linked to Transjordan [now
Jordan], and maybe tomorrow to Iraq." The problem is that an
independent state would be a barrier to eventual integration of parts
of the territories and control of their resources, primarily water.
As for "united Jerusalem," that is a concept of broad and as yet
undetermined scope. "Withdrawal from Gaza" and other territories is
understood to exclude Jewish settlements and the resources they
control. And even this "permanent settlement" lies well down the
road.

It is understandable, then, that the Times editors,
expressing the prevailing view, should see the "historic deal" as a
great opportunity. It is "the Middle East equivalent of the fall of
the Berlin wall," chief diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman
proclaimed. The projected arrangements represent the "triumph of
realism over fanaticism and political courage over political
cowardice." "Realists" understand that in this world, you follow US
orders. Those who are not convinced of the justice of traditional
US-Israeli rejectionism are not only wrong, but are "fanatics" and
"cowards," thus excluded from respectable society. The hysteria of
the rhetoric suggests that more is understood than appears on the
surface.

While some Israeli advocates in the US felt that the victory was
not far-reaching enough, more perceptive ones recognized the scale of
what had been achieved. The PLO had been forced "to become more
reasonable," acceding to Israel's demands, as Times
columnist William Safire, a self-described "pro-Israeli hawk," put
the matter. "Arafat finally appears to be ready to accept
[Menahem] Begin's approach [of 1978], adding the
Gaza-Jericho twist," Safire comments, "having been softened by 15
years of Israeli hard line" -- to which we may add US
intransigence.

The draft agreement makes no mention of Palestinian
national rights, the primary issue on which the US and Israel
broke with the international consensus from the mid-1970s. Throughout
these years, it was agreed that a settlement should be based on UN
242.

There were two basic points of contention: (1) Do we interpret the
withdrawal clause of 242 in accord with the international consensus
(including the US, pre-1971), or in accord with the position of
Israel and US policy from 1971? (2) Is the settlement based
solely on UN 242, which offers nothing to the Palestinians, or
242 and other relevant UN resolutions, as the PLO had proposed
for many years in accord with the nonrejectionist international
consensus. Thus, does the settlement incorporate the right of
refugees to return or compensation, as the UN has insisted since
December 1948 (with US endorsement, long forgotten), and the
Palestinian right to national self-determination that has repeatedly
been endorsed by the UN (though blocked by Washington)? These are the
crucial issues that have stood in the way of a political
settlement.

On these issues, the agreement explicitly and without equivocation
adopts the US-Israeli stand. As noted, Article I states that the
"permanent status will lead to the implementation of Security Council
Resolutions 242 and 338," nothing more. Furthermore, as Beilin made
explicit, the withdrawal clause of UN 242 is to be understood in the
terms unilaterally imposed by the US (from 1971). In fact, the
agreement does not even preclude further Israeli settlement in the
large areas of the West Bank it has taken over, or even new land
takeovers. On such central matters as control of water, it speaks
only of "cooperation" and "equitable utilization" in a manner to be
determined by "experts from both sides." The outcome of cooperation
between an elephant and a fly is not hard to predict.

The victory of the rejectionists is complete, even in the
ideological sphere; given US global power, the version of history
designed by its doctrinal institutions becomes the general framework
for discussion in most of the world, including Europe.

For Palestinians in refugee camps and elsewhere outside the
territories, the agreement offers little hope, and they have
expressed understandable bitterness. Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon also
"criticized the PLO for making concessions with Israel that could
jeopardize Palestinian national rights and undermine the joint Arab
negotiating strategy," Lamis Andoni reported from Amman, giving
"Israel the upper hand in imposing its conditions on each Arab
country separately."

A separate matter entirely is whether the two sides would be
well-advised to accept the agreement devised by Israel and Arafat.
For the US and Israel, the question hardly arises: the agreement
falls within the framework on which they have insisted.

For the Palestinians, the question is more complex. The agreement
entails abandonment of most of their hopes, at least for the
foreseeable future. Nevertheless, realistic alternatives may be much
worse.

Given US power, refusal to accept US-Israeli terms is at once
translated into a demonstration of the worthlessness of such
"fanatics" and "cowards," who thereby cede any rights they might have
been thought to have. Palestinians were once "the darling of many
Western liberals," Thomas Friedman writes (meaning, presumably, that
some Western liberals regarded them as at least semi-human); but they
are beloved no more, and unless they toe the line their former
admirers may abandon them to their fate. Furthermore, the agreement
should offer Palestinians some relief from the barriers to
development imposed by the military administration, no small matter.
And it moves beyond Rubinstein's "autonomy of a POW camp" in that
Palestinians are assigned control over "direct taxation." An
Israeli-supervised "strong police force" of Palestinians might, at
worst, be the local counterpart of Israel's South Lebanon Army,
subduing the population by terror and threat while the masters
observe closely, ready to move if the iron fist is needed. But it
might turn out that Palestinian police will treat the population less
harshly than the Israeli army and border police, and settler
depredations should reduce. Though the agreements say nothing about
the matter, there may be a decline in Israeli settlement and in the
development programs designed to integrate the extensive areas
designated for Jewish settlement into the Israeli economy, leaving
Palestinians on the side. Many issues can be debated, but not -- at
least not seriously -- within a doctrinal framework that identifies
"realism" as what the US and Israel demand, and dismisses critical
analysis in advance as "fanaticism" and "cowardice."

The respected head of the Palestinian delegation, Haidar Abdul
Shafi, had some observations on these matters in a talk in Bethlehem
on July 22, 1993, just as Arafat was secretly moving to take matters
into his own hands, bypassing local Palestinians. Abdul Shafi held
out little hope for the "peace process," which excludes entirely the
possibility "that Palestinians must be the main authority in the
interim period for the people and for the land," leading to true
national self-determination. He stressed, however, that

"the negotiations are not worth fighting about. The
critical issue is transforming our society. All else is
inconsequential... We must decide amongst ourselves to use all our
strength and resources to develop our collective leadership and
the democratic institutions which will achieve our goals and guide
us in the future... The important thing is for us to take care of
our internal situation and to organize our society and correct
those negative aspects from which it has been suffering for
generations and which is the main reason for our losses against
our foes."

His remarks seem to me apt, and of much broader import, ourselves
included.

"When a Jew, in America or in South Africa, talks to
his Jewish companions about 'our' government, he means the
government of Israel."